Fifty-four 5-year-old Head Start children participated in a study of the effect of varied versus repeated training on the development of the ability to categorize and transfer learning. The children were grouped according to chronological age and results of a mastery test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Work categories translated into…

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

This questionnaire is intended to help the classroom teacher group her children more effectively. The teacher must fill out the questionnaire for each child. It consists of 12 questions with four possible responses for each. Questionnaire results will show a pattern of responses for most children. The questionnaire is scored by computer. (See TM…

THE USEFULNESS OF A MULTIVARIATE PARADIGM FOR RESEARCH IN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS EXPLORED IN THIS INVESTIGATION. THE INSTRUCTIONAL PROCESS WAS CONCEPTUALIZED AS FOUR CLUSTERS OF INTERACTING VARIABLES--LEARNER, ENVIRONMENTAL, INSTRUCTOR, AND COURSE VARIABLES. THESE VARIABLES ARE DESIGNATED AS THE "INSTRUCTIONAL GESTALT." FOR METHODOLOGICAL…

Ideologizing is presented as the function of innate intrapersonal and interpersonal categorizing of experience. Ideologies flourish in open systems and decline in closed ones. Classical conceptions of science illustrate the process, to the end that an autonomous scientific ideology for the social sciences, including communication, is suggested.…

Author noted several very important nonepistemological factors which seemed to be particularly relevant to the success or failure of interdisciplinary inquiry, considered the epistemological and methodological constraints on interdisciplinary work, and expanded on the notion of interpretive knowledge as a universally necessary condition for…

Study concerned with the question of why older children remember more in categorized free recall. (Authors/MB)

Study conducted by the Aptitudes Research Project at the University of Southern California, under Contract Nonr-228(20) with the Office of Naval Research, Personnel and Training Branch.

Shows how elaboration theory (ET) sequences the concepts in a taxonomy and argues that the product of an ET analysis is usually in general agreement with sequencing based on learning prerequisite relationships, and that ET sequencing of taxonomic concepts will not violate learning prerequisite relationships. (Author/MER)

This paper presents a scheme for classifying learning tasks, a scale built from that scheme, and data obtained from utilizing the scale with secondary students in various subject areas. (Author/SJL)

College students read two passages. Four groups answered questions requiring either a summary, a new example of the concept, a list of critical attributes of the concept, or identification of a new example. The "identify post-question group" showed the greatest accuracy in classifying new examples. (Author/MH)

Proposes an instructional transaction class hierarchy and describes capability, knowledge, interactions, and associated transactions for three classes of transactions: (1) component transactions (identify, execute, and interpret); (2) abstraction transactions (judge, classify, decide, generalize, and transfer); and (3) association transactions…

Collecting "bugs" is an authentic, engaging approach for students to learn about various arthropods and their habitat. Students are able to construct knowledge from field notes involving direct observation, drawing, and classification of these animals. This activity has continuously provided successful measurable content outcomes in which students…

An eyetracking study testing D. L. Medin and M. M. Schaffer's (1978) 5-4 category structure was conducted. Over 30 studies have shown that the exemplar-based generalized context model (GCM) usually provides a better quantitative account of 5-4 learning data as compared with the prototype model. However, J. D. Smith and J. P. Minda (2000) argued…

A study compares and contrasts a set of English and Spanish prepositions of location in the context of prototype theory. It seeks to establish the prototype concept of each preposition and the degrees of prototypicality by testing for native-speaker choices of examples that illustrate best the most basic use of the preposition. The prepositions…